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Rich Pauloo, PhD
I’m a data scientist at LWA and spend most of my time in R automating ETL pipelines for sensor networks 📡, building Shiny Apps and dashboards 🖥, designing approaches with spatial statistics and hydrologic models, and generally wrangling lots of data.
I have a PhD in Hydrology and my dissertation is titled ‘Emerging consequences of regional-scale aquifer depletion: data-driven and numerical models of well failure, basin salinization, and contaminant transport’ (my exit seminar can be viewed here1 ). Early in my PhD, I found that I really enjoyed data science and programming, and I used these years to sharpen those skills. My published research includes NLP and network analysis2, spatial statistics3, and physical modeling of 3D, subsurface contaminant transport4.
I’m an #rstats nerd and automation/reproducibility fanatic. My favorite tools include tidyverse (dplyr, ggplot2, purrr), shiny, flexdashboard, plotly, DT, RMarkdown (for dashboards/reporting), sf, sp, raster, leaflet (for spatial data), and DBI for databases. A few projects I’m proud of include an R package to query water quality data 📦5, R data science curriculum 📚6, a dashboard that makes millions of water quality observations understandable 📈7, and a model that predicts the risk of wells going dry 💧8 funded by Microsoft’s AI for Earth Grant.
Education
PhD, Hydrogeology
University of California Davis
Davis, CA
2020 - 2015
- Published 5 scientific papers (3 first-author).
- Won ~$153,000 in national, compeitive grants and awards from NASA, Microsoft AI for Earth, AGU, and others.
B.S., Integrative Biology (minor in Conflict Resolution)
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
2011 - 2006
- Delivered departmental commencement speech9 to ~ 5,000 people.
Professional & Research Experience
Data Scientist + Hydrologist
Larry Walker Associates
Berkeley, CA
present - 2020
- Programmed automated ETL pipelines for ~180 real-time sensor networks and dashboards.
- Managed multiple six-figure contracts, scoped work, contributed to strategic marketing, and trained staff.
- Frequent client communication in diverse groups with competing aims.
- Ad hoc geostatistics, hydrologic modeling, remote sensing.
Data Scientist + Co-Founder
Water Data Lab
Remote
present - 2020
- Currently manage $105k in contracts.
- Build ETL pipeline and design strategic approach.
- Co-developed r4wrds.com
Data Engineer
UC Water
Davis, CA
2020 - 2018
- Built a data processing pipeline and web dashboard10 for real-time groundwater data via a wireless sensor network. View paper11.
Graduate Student Researcher
Fogg Lab
UC Davis
2020 - 2015
- Process large hydrologic datasets, 3D numerical groundwater flow and contaminant transport models, & network optimization models.
- Developed novel models of well failure, groundwater salinization, and contaminant transport in porous media.
- Regularly use R, Python, Git, Bash, MODFLOW, RW3D, Paraview, Illustrator, AWS, Linux, ArcGIS, Envi, LaTeX.
Data Lab Researcher
Computational Institute for Geodynamics (CIG)
UC Davis
2019 - 2018
- NLP, text mining, and network analysis in R on a corpus of ~600 PDFs.
- Developed an R Shiny dashboard12 to understand the corpus.
- Results published here13.
Selected Data Science Writing
Automating R scripts on Linux with cron14
N/A
N/A
2020
Using Twilio to Text Myself After Long Running Jobs15
N/A
N/A
2019
Race to the Bottom16
Exploratory data analysis and science journalism California well construction trends.
N/A
2019
Text Analysis of the Mueller Report17
Text mining and sentiment analysis.
N/A
2019
Links
- https://www.richpauloo.com/talk/2020-exit-seminar/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/publication/cig/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/publication/well-failure/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/publication/vhgr/
- https://caopenwater.github.io/sdwisard/
- https://r4wrds.com/
- http://calwaterquality.com/
- https://www.gspdrywells.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBnvVL6XQTw&t=2s
- https://www.richpauloo.com/project/lcsn/
- https://doi.org/10.3390/w12041066
- https://richpauloo.shinyapps.io/cig_nlp
- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8827910
- https://www.richpauloo.com/post/crontabs/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/post/textme/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/post/race-to-the-bottom/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/post/mueller/
- https://www.richpauloo.com/post/infer/